Seven windows on how the physical world really works

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who also writes like a poet, and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is the book that made his reputation outside academic circles. First published in Italian in 2014 and translated into more than fifty languages, it offers seven short essays on the ideas that transformed our understanding of reality in the twentieth century.

The opening lesson is about Einstein's general relativity — the discovery that gravity is not a force pulling things together, as Newton had it, but a curvature in the fabric of space and time caused by mass. Rovelli describes this as one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history, and by the end of a few pages, you understand why he thinks so.

Later lessons tackle quantum mechanics, the nature of particles, thermodynamics and the arrow of time, and Rovelli's own work on loop quantum gravity — an attempt to reconcile the two great theories of the twentieth century, which currently cannot both be true at the same time. He does not pretend the problems are solved. The uncertainty is part of the pleasure.

The final lesson turns inward. Rovelli asks what physics tells us about ourselves: creatures made of atoms, bound by the same laws as stars, alive only briefly in a universe of vast age. The conclusion is not gloomy. The strangeness of our situation is, he suggests, something to be marvelled at rather than mourned.